Everything I Need To Know About Work I Learned From Grand Theft Auto
Another day at the office.
I will never
take any career as seriously as I take my virtual criminal enterprise
I’m incredibly fortunate because not only am I one of the
six recent college graduates in America to have a job, but because I also
happen to really enjoy that job. I love what I do – I find it fascinating and I
love the opportunity to get paid to be creative.
That said, I’m still as much of a lazy shit as I was at any
other job I’ve held: When my alarm goes off every morning, my first thought is,
FUCK me, I’ve got to go to work. BULLSHIT. Even though I’m
going to end up enjoying what I’m doing, I still hate having to get up and go
do it. Likewise, I spend the last couple hours of the day with one eye on the
clock, looking forward to going home. I work to live, not the other way around.
However, when I’m playing an up-and-coming freelance thug in
a Grand Theft Auto game, I’m an absolute workaholic. Each
successive installment in the Grand Theft Auto series has
added more and more extra activities to their vast open worlds – street races,
stunt jump challenges, minigames like pool – but I eschew virtually all of them
in favor of rushing across town to get another mission from whatever bent cop
or sociopathic crimelord needs a witness assassinated or a brick of heroin
stolen.
My in-game avatar will work mission after mission for
virtual days on end without seeing the inside of his apartment or even changing
his clothes. If I brought the same sort of enthusiasm to writing that I bring
to gangland hits and drug dealing, I’d have won the Nobel Prize for literature
by my sophomore year of college.
Networking
is everything
These guys probably have kickass business cards.
Just about every Grand Theft Auto game starts
like this: You’re an everyday guy with impeccable driving skills and decidedly
hazy morals who shows up, penniless and alone, in a fictitious American city.
You’ve got one eccentric friend or relative in the area who inevitably is in a
serious pickle that can only be resolved by you killing someone – presumably
because it wouldn’t be a very interesting game if you just had to help your
friend move a couch into his new apartment or something.
So the way it pans out is that you do a bunch of shitty low
level jobs for your friend until, in the course of one of your missions, you
meet somebody who’s impressed with your ability to run over a prostitute while
simultaneously sniping the fuel line of a pursuing police cruiser with your
Uzi, and then that person starts offering you work. You meet
people through those jobs who start offering you work and so on and so forth
until you’re suddenly the most sought after mass murderer this side of Uday
Hussein.
The only way you can get work in Grand Theft
Auto is by making a name for yourself on the strength of your talent
alone. You never apply for a job or hand some mob boss a resume (JULY
2006 – SAN ANDREAS – SHOT DOWN POLICE HELICOPTER W/ ROCKET LAUNCHER, STOLE ICE
CREAM TRUCK, RAN OVER OLD LADY) – you just do good work and make
connections.
In my first month in LA I sent out probably 150 resumes and
online applications for various entry level industry jobs and didn’t hear back
from any of them. Finally, I finagled an unpaid internship, and thanks to my
two-pronged method of writing great script coverage and kissing copious amounts
of ass, I got the people there to hook me up with about a dozen paid production
assistant gigs.
I didn’t blow up a helicopter or run over any prostitutes
(quite the opposite – I lived in harmony with about 50 of them for two weeks)
but my reputation as a friendly and helpful PA got me a good reputation, which
turned into more work.
The downside to that was that, as a production assistant, I
was the bottom of the food chain and an easy target for abuse and misdirected
rage from the various coked-out producers calling the shots on set.
Fortunately, years of Grand Theft Auto taught me that…
It usually pays off to work for a total
douchecanoe, at least for a while
This is actually one of your least threatening employers.
Your employers in Grand Theft Auto exist
far outside the realm of normative social behavior. If you try to count how
many times one of your employers screams at you, kills one of his underlings in
front of you, waves a gun around, threatens to kill you, or actually
tries to kill you, you’re going to need a pretty huge
abacus. (Or, y’know, a four function calculator.)
Grand Theft Auto isn’t a game that
rewards you for making a principled stand regarding your workplace conditions –
you can either work for crazy people who routinely threaten and backstab you,
or you can turn off the XBox and go read a book or some stupid shit like that.
Over the course of the work you do for these nutjobs, you wind up making a lot
of money and connections that allow you to move onto more lucrative work,
leaving your old bosses in the dust. (Sometimes, you get to kill them later,
which is an added bonus.)
The last PA job I ever did was without a doubt my worst. I’d worked with this company once before – they’d gotten my name from the folks at my internship – and they called me back to do three days as an office PA and two days as a set PA for a commercial for a South Korean bank.
The last PA job I ever did was without a doubt my worst. I’d worked with this company once before – they’d gotten my name from the folks at my internship – and they called me back to do three days as an office PA and two days as a set PA for a commercial for a South Korean bank.
The producer – my boss – was a South Korean national with a
thick accent, a short temper, and the lumpy build and Communistic-chic fashion
sense of the late Kim-Jong Il. He was great at giving vague, unintelligible
instructions, and then flipping out when his implied demands weren’t followed
to the letter.
Two people have ever thought these glasses were fashionable, and I worked for the other one.
On day three of working with this cocksucker* he came back
to the office from an errand, took one look at the production booklets I’d put
together according to his very hazy specifications, and went nuts at me in
front of everyone in the office.
*If you’re a male or female who legitimately enjoys sucking
on penises, please don’t take offense – I’ve got no problem with people who
literally suck cocks, but I cannot abide a cocksucker.
He flipped through one of the booklets, tearing pages out,
yelling at me and demanding to know why I hadn’t included this table or why I’d
used that font or put such and such section ahead of some other section – all
things that he’d just assumed, like the shittiest of girlfriends, that I would
know I had to do.
Finally, he pointed to an actress’s picture on the call
sheet.
“What is her call time tomorrow?” He demanded.
“I… I’m sorry, I don’t know.” I stammered.
He pounded his fist on the desk. “8:30 AM! You should know
this! This should be your Bible! If you ask me another question, you’re fired!
I’ve worked with you twice now – ask yourself, why would I want to work with
you again?”
So we all had to stay three hours late, remaking the
booklets to his marginally different specifications. On set the following day,
he made so many changes to the schedule that the books were all completely
useless within 30 minutes.
Immediately after being publicly humiliated for no reason, I
was very seriously flirting with the notion of marching into his office and
quitting. In my country, that’s not how we talk to
people! I imagined myself yelling in the least racist way possible.
As a general rule, dropping Frank Costello quotes is not a good way to make friends.
But ultimately I swallowed my pride and finished out my week
working for The Cocksucker – I hadn’t had a job in months, and I desperately
needed the money.
In my second day on set, I wound up palling around with an
art department PA. We hit it off and had a great time shit-talking The
Cocksucker behind his back at every opportunity. We exchanged information, and
a week later the art department PA called me to let me know his friend’s ad
agency was looking for freelance copy writers, and would I be interested?
If I’d jumped ship the minute The Cocksucker went all
cocksucker on me, I never would’ve met the art PA (JonathanDenmark.com) who set
me up with a fantastic job. In all likelihood, I’d still be foraging for $100 a
day PA work, getting up at 3:30 AM and breathing cigarette fumes and BO from
the grips.
The Cocksucker’s company called me earlier today, offering
me a PA gig. I politely declined, and told the person on the phone that I don’t
do PA work anymore. I had leveraged my work for the low-level mob flunky into a
contract with a friendly and professional major crime syndicate, and I needed
him no longer.
Now, I’m making it my goal to become successful enough that
I can afford to buy The Cocksucker’s company through an anonymous third party,
and then force him to watch as I burn the building to the ground, all while
dancing around cackling, flipping him off, and yelling, “Who’s fired
now!?” There would probably be an arson investigation, but I could
easily elude the authorities by having my car repainted and lying low for a
couple of minutes.
At least, that’s how I roll in Grand Theft
Auto.
Truman Capps hopes that an inordinately long update
makes up for the lateness.